ToroDB – Document-oriented JSON database on top of PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/torodb/torodb <comment><USER2> Another project worth mentioning is mongolike - It uses PLV8 to implement the Mongodb interface ontop of Postgres.

[https://github.com/JerrySievert/mongolike](https://github.com/JerrySievert/mongolike)

<comment><USER3> And don't forget Mongres: [https://github.com/umitanuki/mongres](https://github.com/umitanuki/mongres)

<comment><USER4> This is really cool, thanks for pointing it out... I'd, personally prefer that some of these implementations allowed for both a mongo wire protocol compatibility, as well as being able to use a similar interface within plv8 ... that would be awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is now on the project's wiki ([https://github.com/torodb/torodb/wiki/How-ToroDB-stores- json...](https://github.com/torodb/torodb/wiki/How-ToroDB-stores-json- documents-internally)) more detailed information about how ToroDB stores in tables the JSON documents. Hope this information helps :)

</comment><comment><USER6> As someone who has been coding web apps for a very long time, it feels odd to say this, the PostgreSQL community is doing some very interesting things. I'm excited to see where things go.

<comment><USER7> Genuinely curious...why does it feel odd to say that?

<comment><USER8> I second that. Postgres has been doing interesting things for years now.

<comment><USER6> When I first started web development (mid/late 90's), Postgres was the very conservative open source choice. MySQL was fast, good enough, and broke a few big rules.

That hasn't been the case for a while, but with the recent speed improvements in the past few years, prompted by NoSQL, and MySQL's troubles with Oracle, Postgres has become the Open Source SQL frontrunner, and everybody's taking it in really interesting directions.

<comment><USER4> I'm hoping the JSON & plv8 support gets much more in the box, and that the replication setup becomes more baked in as well.

Right now, I'm migrating from MS-SQL to a MongoDB replica set for most of our core data. Mainly because the failover works better than most, and the licensing costs for even MS-SQL with replication and failover are budget blowing. Most of the PostgreSQL options for replication are really bolted on with some serious drawbacks, and automatic failover to a new master is another issue.

I've always liked PostgreSQL (and Firebird for what that's worth)... I do hope that some of these features become more of a checkbox item during installation, and less of a bolted on, have to compile and dive into the deep to get them, and even then only have it half baked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "JSON documents are stored relationally, not as a blob/jsonb."

How is the transformation designed, to go from a structured document to a flat set of tables, akin to what an object-relational mapper would do?

<comment><USER5> The transformation is performed at the ToroDB layer. Each document is analyzed and several steps are performed:

\- Document is received in BSON format (as per the MongoDB wire protocol) and transformed into a KVDocument. KVDocument is an internal implementation, an abstraction of the concrete representation of a JSON document (i.e., hierarchical, nested sets of key-pairs).

\- Then, KVDocuments are split by levels (called sub-documents).

\- Each subdocument is further split into a subdocument type and the data. The subdocument type is basically an ordered set of the data types of that subdocument.

\- Subdocuments are matched 1:1 to tables. If there is an existing table for the given subdocument type, the document is stored directly there. If there isn't, a new table with that type is directly created. This means that there is also a 1:1 mapping between the attribute names (columns) and key names, and makes it very readable from a SQL user perspective.

\- There is a table called structure that is basically a representation of the JSON objetct but without the (scalar) data. Think of the JSON object but only the braces and square brackets, plus all the keys (or entries in arrays) that contain objects. There is, per level, a key in this structure that cointains the name of the table where the data for this object is stored. This table uses a jsonb field to store this structure, but note that there's no actual data in this jsonb field.

\- There's finally a root table which matches structure with the current document. This is used as structures are frequently re-used for many documents. This is in part one of the biggest factors which contributes to significantly reduce the storage required compared to, for example, MongoDB, as the "common" information of that "types of documents" is stored only once.

This information and more will be shortly added to the project's wiki. However, it's very easy to see if you run ToroDB and look at the created tables :)

Note: I'm one of the authors of ToroDB

<comment><USER10> Is it possible to quantify the savings of storage and IO?

<comment><USER11> I'd be very interested to know more about this too. There is considerable overhead for each row in PostgreSQL (24 byte header, which must be aligned). Obviously you'll save a bit if there are repeated keys higher up, but you'll pay for the foreign key references to those rows in the children.

<comment><USER5> It is true that PostgreSQL has such a high row overhead. But the storage savings are significant, in any way. Please see the presentation pointed out earlier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> as far as I understand it, shredding hiearchical documents into a relationa store is optional feature of Oracle XMLDB

[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database- features/xmldb/xm...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database- features/xmldb/xmlchoosestorage-v1-132078.pdf)

It is called XMLDB structured storage (vs binary storage, that one actual stores the hierarchical XML naitively)

The XMLDB structured storage I think has been available since 2003 (but I might be wrong there).

Oracle's XMLDB structure requires XSD declaration. Within that declaration XMLDB can use 'hints' to indicate if a given set of attributes across documents is related. And if yes, it will shred the docs in a way that the related attributes will be co-joined.

The advantage, as the author of ToroDB noted below is a) space saving b) ability to use relational joins that are using disk-optimized access strategies.

The disadvantage (at least in Oracle XMLDB structured option) -- is the need for declaration of the model ahead of time, and joins for deeply/complex structured documents.

It looks like ToroDB 'senses' the model of each document on the way in. I think there are definetely use cases for this approach, that tolerate the trade off between ingestion speed and storage control. Plus using a relational engine underneath allows for ACID properties (eg multi-object rollback/commmits) -- which native mongo does not provide.

<comment><USER5> platform, very interesting the XMLDB info. As you point out, ToroDB does not require any model declaration ahead. It's perfectly "schema-less", as it 'senses' the model of each document.

Regarding ingestion speed, it is very high, even compared to MongoDB's. There are some benchmarks in this presentation: [http://www.slideshare.net/8kdata/toro-db- pgconfeu2014](http://www.slideshare.net/8kdata/toro-db-pgconfeu2014)

<comment><USER13> I don't really see why ToroDB can't be implemented on top of Oracle :) There could be some demand for it there.

I needed this for a side project at work a while back, but didn't get the time to implement it.

Oracle's cumbersome enough already; I for one have no desire to drag XSDs into it to use XMLDB.

<comment><USER5> I'm not saying it's not gonna happen...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cool concept. I'm not a huge fan of normalizing out the underlying data into pseudorelational tables.

Reconstructing trees in Postgres is a little gnarly on larger tables but it's definitely neat to see more people trying to combine the user experience of Mongo with the technology advantages of Postgres.

What inspired the creation of ToroDB? Are you using it in production yourselves in a limited way?

<comment><USER5> Thanks!

Documents are split into chunks before hitting the database, so there is no need to reconstruct trees in PostgreSQL. Indeed, many queries don't need to reconstruct the (whole) tree, just a part of it or even just one level. However, in doing so, ToroDB is able to offer queries that only need so scan a small subset of the database (compared to the whole database) to query your data.

ToroDB was inspired by the DRY principle: relational databases like PostgreSQL are already good enough that with some tweaking may perfectly well as a document-store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very interesting approach. One question I have is around the licensing. I see that it's licensed using AGPLv3. I would think that would require any code that connects to it to be open source. Am I reading that right? If so, then I am guessing that there will be a commercial offering w/o the restrictions?

Thanks

<comment><USER5> Yes and yes :)

<comment><USER16> Wait. Does AGPL really require my Python code to be released as open-source if I want to connect to your server? As I understand AGPL , if you modify the code, you must make it available to people connecting over the network, that's all.

<comment><USER5> Errr yes, you're right, my "yes and yes" was too quick. Sorry for that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd really like to write a similar, mongo-compatible layer for FoundationDB.

This is great work.

</comment><comment><USER18> Super interesting. Though would be interested how it works. Is it using JSON/hstore underneath?

Right now reading the code seems to be the only option to analyze it.

<comment><USER5> No, it's not using json/jsonb/hstore (to store the true JSON data). It uses a bit of jsonb but for a side part of the information.

And this is the true power of it, that data is stored in normal, relational tables. Please see a comment above explaining this in more detail :)

<comment><USER19> Does all data have to be stored relationally or can you pick and choose?

Reason I ask is for example something like a game session blob from a multiplayer game, I might not want that to be merged with the relational data and just throw it away after a certain amount of time/days/weeks so they are nice as blobs but other data would be better relational.

Yes there are app/cache level ways around this but might be cool if there was a way to choose auto relational or blobby. I guess ultimately you could just have multiple stores for live and archival data but something to think about.

<comment><USER5> Data is laid out transparently to the user. Indeed, there should be no (visible) difference as to how it is stored. Data within a single "level" is stored on a single table. If you want to keep blobs, you can definitely do that, they will be stored as such (bytea in postgres).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So can I use it with meteor?

<comment><USER21> I would be surprised if ToroDB implemented the oplog which Meteor uses for efficient live-updating, but I guess it _should_ work with the polling mode.

SQL support (i.e. direct Postgres support) is on the Meteor roadmap for post-1.0.

<comment><USER5> ToroDB is definitely going to have MongoDB's oplog, so it should work as is for live-updating.

SQL support for ToroDB... there's surely room for it in the future ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> To the author: you should probably use VODKA index.

<comment><USER23> VODKA indexes are still experimental and exist only as a branch in Alexanders own repo ([https://github.com/akorotkov/postgres/tree/vodka](https://github.com/akorotkov/postgres/tree/vodka)). I do not think they are anywhere near production ready, and even if they are they are not an extension.

Alexander is working on allowing new index access methods (the type of index: e.g. hash, btree, gin, gist) to be added in extensions.

<comment><USER22> Yep. And that's why I believe it's a great way to test/improve VODKA.

PS: now I'm not sure if it applies considering that the data is actually normalized inside Postgres.</comment></comment></comment>


Why we moved to Rackspace Cloud, and Why we left 1and1.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.blue74.com/?p=51

<comment><USER2> I visited the rackspace cloud pricing page [http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers...](http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers/pricing)

'the cloud' is still pretty darn pricey. Yes, I get you can 'scale up' (exactly _how_ means different things to different people) but you're somewhat locked in to their ecosystem (at least, to take advantage of the features of the particular cloud in question.

For my needs I've got a server up paying < $100 month for dedicated bandwidth, 100 mbit connection, 300 gig of disk space, multiple IPs, quad 2.8ghz and 4 gigs of RAM.

The close equivalent on Rackspace is $286, and still only nets me half the disk space. Yes, there's a few niceties you get with 'cloud' providers, but for $200+ per month difference, I'm not sure I need them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Who are you with? I'd be interested if they are cheaper! :D

<comment><USER2> Using reliablehostingservices.net - a small operation out of Virgnia. What's somewhat funny to me is that they've got an SSL cert that's out of date (but I still use them). No complaints so far (6 months). I was with theplanet.com for many years before that, but getting a server with more RAM was/is just too expensive at many places.

I found RHS via webhostingtalk forums - there's _loads_ of great offers from smaller shops there.

[http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=36&sort...](http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=36&sort=threadstarted&order=desc)

Just off the main page I found wooservers in Scranton offering some decent deals: <http://wooservers.com/special-deals/>

There's lots of places to look for better price/performance than the big players. I've no doubt that rackspace and others provide more handholdingand 'support' but I've found there's generally very little support I've used from data centers over the past 11 years of doing dedicated server management.</comment></comment></comment>


Save a screenshot to Dropbox with a keyboard shortcut (Ubuntu) - <AUTHOR> http://bitkickers.blogspot.com/2012/02/save-screenshot-to-dropbox-with.html

<comment><USER2> A quick analysis of my own experience here: For windows and mac, the best software I've found so far is puush.com. I made a quick analysis a while back, and realized that obce you get used to such software, you end up pressing the hotkey and immediately expect to be able to paste a link. Puush excels in that regard; they have a good screencap engine which allows fash shots, and a good webserver which uploads pics rapidly and return a link asap.

Unfortunately, they lack a Linux option. As i use debian, i had to find an alternative, or more in the spirit, make my own. I tested a few others with linux versions, namely lookit and shutter, but being fully open source they had their own flaws: uploading to imgur is damn slow, and after using puush for a while it was frustrating.

I tried writing my own using pykeybinder, since it seemed more nautral than using autohotkey, which imho seemed like a port from the windows version and overkill. I then took code from pygtk in order to take fast screenshots in python. It has the added ability of being able to take just the current selected window as well. In the end, however, the ability for the -s option in scrot to take a shot of a selected area was too tempting so i added a wrapper in my script for that.

For uploading this is where writing something that copies to the dropbox public folder shines: it allows you to generate a name and link for the file BEFORE it uploads, which is an insane speedup. The file can then upload as you're sending the email with the link, for example.

If anyone wants to look at my crappy code, it's at

[https://github.com/jcitme/pyscreenshare/blob/master/pyscreen...](https://github.com/jcitme/pyscreenshare/blob/master/pyscreenshare.py)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have created something like this using AutoHotkey

See [http://blog.sachleen.com/dropbox-uploader-and-screenshot- uti...](http://blog.sachleen.com/dropbox-uploader-and-screenshot-utility-with- autohotkey.html)

Includes screenshot, file, and text upload.

</comment><comment><USER4> And for Mac, there's: <http://grabbox.devsoft.no/></comment>


The Death of Corporate Research Labs - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dshr.org/2020/05/the-death-of-corporate-research-labs.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> I worked at Nokia Research Center for a while when it was still market leader making smart phones. My observation is that most companies that have a research center also have some level of disconnect between their main business and their research branches. The two just operate on different time lines.

More worryingly and problematic is that there is also a notion of "not invented here" where business units have very little patience for things coming out of research units because they weren't involved. It's petty and stupid and in Nokia's case a large part of the reason why Apple and Google ate its lunch. It's not that they did not have competing technology but that they didn't know what to do with it.

Corporate R&D works best when corporate leadership has some level of affinity with it. Elon Musk is a great example of a true R&D minded leader. All his companies are basically are R&D labs that happen to produce insanely valuable products as a side effect. It takes a certain type of leadership to funnel billions to the right projects and then turn them into successful products. It requires something most business leaders simply don't have: a clue. Elon Musk for all his flaws understands technology deeply. Most of his contemporaries in the car industry are clueless bean counters that know little more about cars than the number of wheels they are typically equipped with. I bet pretty much all of them had R&D labs 20 years ago working on exactly the kind of things that Tesla brought to market successfully. They just bungled turning that into product because of a lack of vision & technical leadership.

<comment><USER3> I remember reading in the early iPhone days that Apple recognised virtually no spending on R&D. That wasn't because they didn't do research or develop new products, it's that they simply didn't see that as separate from their normal day to day operations. I think that's the same attitude as You're describing with Elon Musk. It's all R&D all the time. That's just how products are developed.

Now it's different at Apple in that they do recognise a lot if spending on R&D but I think that's for tax reasons.

<comment><USER2> Exactly, Steve Jobs would involve himself deeply with product development and be in the loop on a lot of product detail.

What you don't get to see with Apple is all the stuff they don't launch or that lingers on some shelf for years and years. They only talk openly about stuff that they are ready to show and productize giving the false impression that these things just popped into existence.

By the time the iphone shipped, they'd been working on it in some form or another for over half a decade or so. Giving people enough room to do stuff like that with an open ended agenda and strategy is exactly how you move forward as a company. The value of people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk is recognizing the strategic value of efforts like this in an early stage and then making sure it happens. That requires being clued in enough to recognize the strategic value and focused enough to then make it happen. If you look at the timing, this was shortly after they launched OS X and apparently went "what else can we do with this?" (IOS is based on the same architecture).

Corporate R&D labs are where this stuff gets parked by companies that are too impatient to wait for that. That's exactly what happened in Nokia.

<comment><USER4> interestingly, before shareholder-value primate reaching the last exec, the companies with big research units were economic and innovative powerhouses. E.g. think of the Olivetti corporation (which sadly died after it's leading personel exited.)

<comment><USER5> Shareholder value capitalism was only ever an aspiration.

In practice companies have always been run for the benefit of corporate insiders. Not the widows and orphans who might own a few stocks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe it's more fruitful to not just consider the Death of Corporate Research Labs, but also ask ourselves "why did they even exist in the first place?" This day in age, the _expectation_ , for better or worse, is that the State sponsors research; this was very much not the case from, say 1850-1950. Luminaries did tons of basic science research under the auspices of corporate (like Irving Langmuir) and private (like Peter Mitchell) labs.

Without assigning causality (I happen to think that the primary cause is "low hanging fruit" phenomenon), the transition to state sponsored research has coincided with a general loss of scientific productivity in many fields, and even in some fields with explosive growth, like genomics, there has been major corporate involvement (half the human genome was sequenced by a not just private, but a wall-street traded, entity).

Yet the narrative of late has been "if the state doesn't sponsor it, nobody will". I don't feel like I have a solid understanding of why corporate research labs were a thing, or even, how science got done in the pre- manhattan-project/Vannevar Bush era.

<comment><USER7> _None_ of the bedrock game-changer research from that period - EM theory, thermodynamics, radioactivity, QM, relativity, the original discovery of DNA - was funded by corporations.

Commercial research was responsible for conceptual refinements of existing insights, and for innovations developed as industrial and consumer applications, but not for the original intellectual breakthroughs that made specific classes of inventions and devices _thinkable._

Computing itself was state-sponsored - first with Turing+Church's theoretical work, then with various practical implementations whose develop was accelerated by WWII, then with state subsidies and grants for further military and industrial development.

Recently state funding has become less and less effective because of the financialisation of academia. Universities now have explicit financial goals and lean heavily on the grant funding game.

Previously the culture was far more tolerant of blue sky inquiry that might not have an immediate payoff - or any payoff at all.

<comment><USER8> > _None of the bedrock game-changer research from that period - EM theory, > thermodynamics, radioactivity, QM, relativity, the original discovery of DNA > - was funded by corporations._

Ever heard of the Solvay conferences?

While not embedded in one company, these confs were definitely sponsored by an industrial. And strongly impactex 20th century advancements in physics.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference)

<comment><USER5> Or look at the history of the chemical and pharmaceutical industry in Germany.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a (non-PhD) researcher who works for one of the last traditional industrial research labs in Silicon Valley, I've noticed this trend for years. I've seen industrial research labs either close or become increasingly focused on short- term engineering goals. I also have noticed that newer Silicon Valley companies have adopted what Google calls a "hybrid approach" ([https://research.google/pubs/pub38149/](https://research.google/pubs/pub38149/)) where there are no divisions between research groups and product groups, and where researchers are expected to write production-quality code. I've noticed many of my PhD-holding peers taking software engineering positions when they finish their PhD programs, and I also noticed more people who were formerly employed as researchers at places like IBM Almaden and HP Labs switch to software engineering positions at FAANG or unicorn companies.

Unfortunately, as someone who is also working toward finishing a PhD, I've seen very little guides for CS PhD students that reflect this reality. To be honest, I love research and I'd love to stay a researcher throughout my career, but I don't have the same love for software engineering, though I am comfortable coding. Unfortunately with these trends, traditional research is now largely confined to academia, which is very competitive to enter and where COVID-19's effects on its future are uncertain at this time, and federal laboratories such as Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. I fear losing my job (nothing lasts forever) and having to grind LeetCode since there are few other industrial research labs, though given the reality maybe I should start grinding LeetCode anyway.

<comment><USER10> I know a (non-PhD) researcher who moved on after one of those labs closed and sadly he finds it impossible to get a research job again. Academia is his only option but he'll have to earn a PhD before getting such a job...

<comment><USER9> It's a tough situation, especially for non-PhD holders. Even with a PhD it's possible for a researcher to enter a rough patch where a career change looks inevitable. The last time I was unemployed I started sending out my résumé to various community colleges and universities to enter their part-time/adjunct lecturer pools (I have a masters), but unfortunately my lay-off period didn't match well with the academic hiring period. I managed to get a few interviews for software engineering positions, but the algorithms-based interviewing bar is very high these days for a software engineering job, and admittedly my software engineering chops degraded due to spending years in research. Ultimately I ended up finding an AI residency program at a research lab, which is how I ended up at my current position, but it required switching research areas and taking a minor salary drop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is pretty strange to blame the "more relaxed antitrust environment in the 1980s" when it was the 1982 anti-trust breakup of Ma Bell that destroyed Bell Labs and ended the monopoly profit flows that subsidized the telecom labs.

<comment><USER12> The Bell System, IBM and Xerox, which all had corporate research labs were all monopolies in effect - the Bell System by regulation and the '56 Consent Decree, IBM by overwhelming market dominance, and Xerox by patent protections. This gave all three corporations excess monopoly profits, some of which could be devoted to research. Although the antitrust suit against IBM was settled, it did modify IBM's behavior and it ultimately failed to compete well with mini and microcomputer companies. In Xerox case, the expiration of patents allowed competitors into the market.

Without a monopoly a corporation will find it very difficult to justify research that can be used by other businesses.

The transistor was a disaster for the Bell System. It was not particularly useful in the telephony system of the day, which used high voltages in tube transmission equipment and high, intermittent currents in electromagnetic switching equipment. On the other hand, the 1956 Consent Decree forced the Bell System out of other businesses (audio, computer, consumer electronics, etc.) and out of other countries (Canada, Caribbean). So the Bell System could not use it's new transistor to expand in the businesses where it fit, and having a fundamental patent on it exposed the Bell System to great anti-trust scrutiny and greater regulatory duress, such as the FCC Computer Inquiries.

<comment><USER13> >having a fundamental patent on it exposed the Bell System to great anti-trust scrutiny

I don't understand how this follows, having fundamental patents should lead to the breakup of basically every large US company by the government by this logic.

AT&T licensed the transistor to a number of companies, so even if the Bell system didn't have a use for the device (it did in fact, in order to reduce the size of telephone exchanges) so they derived revenue from the invention. How this translates into a 'disaster' for the Bell System is unclear since it was eventually broken up because of the decision that long distance and local service should be different markets long after the patent on the transistor had expired.

<comment><USER14> The argument is that, if I invent the Telephone 2.0, I can pretty confidently predict I won't be allowed to capture so much of the profit from it. This provides an incentive for companies to shift their R&D spending towards product development rather than foundational research.

<comment><USER15> If you invent anything related to cell phone standards and it gets adopted by whatever committee sets the standard, you can become a part of the patent pool, agree to license under FRAND and make money from your research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Corporations still do invest large sums of money into long-term projects: most acquisitions as well as buildings are amortised over a decade or so, which is about the time-frame I would expect research to have, on average. Airplane and car development also comes to mind.

So I believe the complaint about "short-termism" has become a bit too popular. It's great to prop up your bona-fides as a cynic. It's less good at explaining actual behaviour.

Instead, I believe research has simply become less profitable over time. The decades from about 1920 into the 1980 were a time of extraordinary rapid successes in the hard sciences: the scientific method had been established, and industry, finance, law, transport, and communications all made sudden jumps into modernity, allowing scientific institutions as we know them today to exist.

If you read about the history of physics, for example, you'll see photos of the entire class of 192x at some German university, and every single person on the photo later won a Nobel or had at least some minor unit named after them.

We have continued to improve institutions, infrastructure, and our ability to broaden the chance to get into the sciences. But, unfortunately, it's almost a rule of nature that progress slows over time. That's sort-of soothing, actually, because it means we aren't entirely incapable of prioritising easier thing.

Government-sponsored research can continue at higher prices. But private, for- profit endeavours have a very specific point where expected returns turn negative.

<comment><USER17> This 1000%. In the 40s, you invested a bunch of money into a research lab and you got the transistor. If only that kind of payoff could still happen today.

<comment><USER18> I don't get this complaint? The leverage for R&D is vastly higher now than ever before: You leave Zuckerberg in his dorm room and you get Facebook. You leave Larry and Sergey in a garage and you get Google. You leave Steve Jobs and Jony Ives together and you get dozens of products in Apple.

The money in vs money out in research has never been more absurdly positive in human history.

This is why companies aren't investing in R&D, because they don't need to do as much as they used to, because a little goes a lot farther.

<comment><USER19> None of those are breakthrough discoveries, hell most of those arguably weren't even the first to market. MySpace existed before Facebook, Search Engines existed before Google, Phones in Japan were just as advanced as the first iPhone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This type of article comes up from time to time, and is generally wrong on many points.

* Corporate Labs are not for primary research, at least in the United States. In the U.S., any primary research is done at universities, developed from research to prototype and patent at NASA, and then licensed to a U.S. company to go to product. For non-primary research, prototypes are developed by corporations via grants from government agencies.

* Bell Labs, before AT&T monopoloy breakup, was a special business case. Its funding existed in a game of legislation maneuvering. It is not an exemplar.

* Think of labs as "tier 5 tech support, when the engineers are stumped".

Most labs are holding areas for smart people to solve sudden business problems. For those who read the famous analysis of criticality accidents in non-military settings, you need some smart folk hanging around to prevent disasters.

For example, Sun Labs had people working (forever) on some hopeful breakthrough. Howard Davidson, a failure engineer, was pulled off task when server boxes started breaking (paper washers being glued in manufacturing) or card connections started failing (silver substituted for gold). These were high impact problems not solvable by line engineers.

Similarly Ricoh Labs had a day when everyone was pulled off to disassemble a large machine and figure out a feeding problem that had a hard solution. Intel keeps materials PhDs in the fab areas just in case something comes up that would slow throughput.

* Many labs have reputations no longer deserved. I worked at PARC and found some teams made magic and others made bloat. Look at the short term results, meaning the past decade, to rate a lab.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm really confused. When looking at artificial intelligence it seems that actually we have dominating corporate labs which through integrated services (such as compute and data), totally dominate academia.

It's coming to the point where researchers that want to make a difference are actively choosing corporate research labs over academic ones.

<comment><USER22> > I'm really confused. When looking at artificial intelligence it seems that > actually we have dominating corporate labs which through integrated services > (such as compute and data), totally dominate academia.

But this is just one unique case - where access to a lot of data and a lot of compute makes a huge difference.

I'm not sure that it translates to many other fields in CS.

<comment><USER23> Corporate research is still going to somewhat be at the whimsy of what's bleeding edge AND has some applicable value; the idea of it just is a little different with things like the 10% or 20% "constructive free-time" model. Each engineer in FAANG-like companies just get a 10-20% salary allotment instead of the equivalent expense of researcher headcount. The idea of "constructive free time" for work is just the "agile" iteration of the research lab.

<comment><USER24> Except "constructive free time" mostly isn't a thing anymore, right?

<comment><USER5> You can still get 20% time at Google. But you have to take it. They don't shove it in your face.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Research is very hard and has low financial rewards. If it's funded by state, it's poorly paid (think of grad students, postdocs, APs). If it's funded by corporate, it's basically tedious product design and it's not interesting science or even proper research anymore. In industry, it's typically done by second class citizens. Long term research is worse.

We have the classical problem of creating value vs capturing the value.

I believe that's a major factor. I often meet students and the vast majority want good paying 9-5 jobs and don't want to bother with research or academic papers.

</comment><comment><USER26> " Large corporate labs, however, are unlikely to regain the importance they once enjoyed. Research in corporations is difficult to manage profitably. "

The easy fix is to classify the work as a net positive for a community, and provide tax incentives such that it becomes by definition profitable, since society can cost-in the scenario where the lab doesn't exist.

<comment><USER16> Research can obviously be deducted from profits for tax purposes already, just like most other business expenses.

Beyond that, it it's quite hard to set up a system where the incentives still motivate good research. It may also just make more sense for governments to spent the money on university research or institutions like the Max Planck Society, rather than giving it to companies where the public gets less of a say in its use, and any profits are privatized.

<comment><USER26> Govt. tried that during WW2, it found that nothing got commercialized because you need a business structure surrounding the research.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I would attribute it to recent culture of ROI grown in high leadership of the company. They don't understand patience, values, human relationships and necessary soft skills to realise that Innovation and research are vital health of the company. Problem is they are all fast thinkers and great presenters and that's what js valued nowadays in orgs. The innovators and researchers can't sustain in this environment. The leadership wants ROI from everything, even research. That's not going to create a good culture and innovation wouldn't grow.

</comment><comment><USER28> This article argues what I believe is the opposite of the truth: that corporate research productivity is correlated with anti trust enforcement. I think this is very wrong! Bell labs really fell apart AFTER AT&T was broken up. Xerox parc declined AFTER Xerox was ruled a monopoly. Anti trust enforcement KILLED innovation, and I think it's really important that we get the correct relationship here.

</comment><comment><USER29> What worsens the problem is that publicly funded research often solves toy application problems (at least in CS); academics know that they need to "apply" their research to get funding/citations/publications with relatively little effort, but from an industry/real-world perspective, many application scenarios hardly make sense and are hand-wavy-ly evaluated (for example, in applications of CS, too often the code is not shared so that the results are practically not reproducible). The current system simply rewards researchers who manage to get into the top venues with the least effort possible, and for many who aren't brilliant the pseudo-application approach is the way to go. IMHO, this broadens the gap between academia and industry, because it's hard for a practitioner to pick out the few relevant nuggets in a stream of half- baked applied research.

</comment><comment><USER30> This sounds a bit hyperbolic when you have Microsoft doing pie-in-the-sky research on topological quantum computing, Google and IBM research teams arguing over quantum supremacy, etc.

</comment><comment><USER31> Good overview!

I work in a corporate research lab. We're not big (market cap ~25B) but there is a real thirst for innovations.

I'll echo the point about Research v Development. We're much more heavy on the development side of things, with time horizons of ~3.5 years. Research is ~10 years. Our research department is just me and 4 other guys. Our development department is _much_ larger.

One thing I found different is in M&A. We've purposefully _not_ done a lot of M&As. Mostly because the bureaucracy is so thick here. Monopolizing the time of the smaller companies is simpler and faster than trying to onboard them. I suspect there are healthcare issues involved too.

It'll be interesting to see how long things last.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm not sure how true that is for sectors other than software/AI, but in AI most academic researcher complain that all the moonshot research (often not even commercially applicable) is now solely coming from corporate research labs e.g. Deepmind, Facebook etc., as opposed to universities. They attribute this to poaching of faculty by companies, lack of resources in universities, lack of motivation in grad students to stay in academia.

</comment><comment><USER33> There should be [more] publicly-funded, non-profit organizations that do research for research's sake, whose fruits are made available to all.

To avoid the problem of controversial projects causing some funding sources to pull their support, there could be mechanisms for funding individual projects.

And to avoid the risk of reappropriation by a government or military, they could be hosted in the EU. :)

</comment><comment><USER34> As of 2016 corporate R&D was at a record high.

[https://www.aip.org/fyi/2016/us-rd-spending-all-time-high- fe...](https://www.aip.org/fyi/2016/us-rd-spending-all-time-high-federal- share-reaches-record-low)

<comment><USER35> R&D measures often include a lot more D than R.

<comment><USER34> Do you claim this was not the case when R&D spending was demonstrably lower? I see no evidence demonstrating that when I looked for it.

<comment><USER35> I'm claiming that the R part of R&D was always tiny to begin with. That rising spending R&D is not indicative of much more R compared to dedicated research labs.

<comment><USER34> >That rising spending R&D is not indicative of much more R compared to dedicated research labs.

R&D are not binary options.

I know in some fields a massive amount of published papers are coming from corporations, and I suspect if I could find data on it that the percentage of peer-reviewed publications from corporations is much higher than in the past.

Certainly in various CS and math disciplines I work with, corporations have made massive inroads.

You're trying hard to push at a possible loophole in the rise in spending, but without evidence that more spending was not spent on what you think it should be, it's sensible to assume it was actually spent on increased R _AND_ D.

Otherwise, for every conjecture you can make without evidence, I can just as easily make the opposite conjecture, and neither has been demonstrated.

Take a few moments and try to source some good evidence - I looked at a few directions and didn't find anything one way or the other, except that spending has increased.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I worked at SAIC back when it was a small company (and before changing the name to Leidos). I will forever be grateful for being able to work about 25% of my time on IR&D, all of my own choosing. I think the US government allowed us about 1% or 2% of our gross to be reimbursed R&D - I forget the details.

At my last job before retiring (Capital One, a great company to work for BTW) my team had a huge amount of autonomy on what we worked on, but my team was awesome.

I don't really understand the relative merits of many small R&D projects vs. huge infrastructure. Perhaps the industry is just moving to a many small projects approach?

</comment><comment><USER37> Well, corporate research money may be drying up, so now the public is being asked to fund it (at least in California). There's a $5.5 billion bond initiative (Proposition 14) on the ballot for 2020. This is similar to proposition 71 which was passed in 2004 for $3 billion, "The California Stem Cell Research and Cures Act".

      California Proposition 14, the Stem Cell Research Institute Bond Initiative,
      https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_14,_Stem_Cell_Research_Institute_Bond_Initiative_(2020)

</comment><comment><USER38> Trouble starts with the term R&D which names two separate things that rarely go together (I think PARC was somewhat close to doing both). A company research lab would be decidedly not development or it's not a research lab. The best way to run a company research lab is to run it as a marketing tool, like a slightly more on-topic way of sponsoring a sports team. IBM seems to do it that way, at least whenever a bluishly named supercomputer is ruining yet another human game. I wonder if they are aware of that analogy.

</comment><comment><USER39> Research has (correctly) been outsourced. If you have a good idea, go prove it and then you can sell it to Acme for $100m. That's a much better deal for Acme because they only need to buy things that work. And it's a much better deal for you (you get $100m to share with your investors instead of a $10 dollar voucher [0] for a $100m idea).

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Hall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Hall)

</comment><comment><USER40> I remember an interesting article (I can't find the reference) that made the claim that for a number of pharma labs, the advantage in hiring researchers is not that they are likely to make a great discovery--but rather that they will be up to date with the literature and be able to recognize a potentially great discovery and to productize it. This is not necessarily trivial as a number of things that work in an academic lab setting don't translate into actual usable drugs.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is part of a larger pattern where we are not investing in anything anymore that doesn't bring immediate returns to some investor; not basic research as in the article, not public infrastructure, not planning for things like climate change. It's all about immediate gratification, fast returns. Kicking the can on every problem and avoiding any unpleasant decisions or long term investments.

</comment><comment><USER42> Looking out of my office window in Stuttgart I can see the big sign "Nokia Bell Labs". You can almost smell all the history this sign carries

</comment><comment><USER43> Non-mobile link: [https://blog.dshr.org/2020/05/the-death-of-corporate- researc...](https://blog.dshr.org/2020/05/the-death-of-corporate-research- labs.html)

</comment><comment><USER44> Big pharma still has research labs. Or else, where do all their patents come from?

<comment><USER45> Indeed. Biopharma has some of the highest spend on R&D as a percentage of revenue of any industry sector.[1]

However, keep in mind a big part of that is development, not research. It's still science and not guaranteed to work, but it's more focused on the development needed to bring a product to market versus doing science to make new discoveries.

[1][https://www.statista.com/statistics/270233/percentage-of- glo...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/270233/percentage-of-global-rundd- spending-by-industry)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Interesting, after the Bell Labs example, I was going to guess that anti-trust enforcement meant that companies weren't big enough to afford an internal lab anymore.

But the OP, quoting/citing Arora et al, actually suggests the REVERSE causative correlation:

> Historically, many large labs were set up partly because antitrust pressures > constrained large firms' ability to grow through mergers and acquisitions. > In the 1930s, if a leading firm wanted to grow, it needed to develop new > markets. With growth through mergers and acquisitions constrained by anti- > trust pressures, and with little on offer from universities and independent > inventors, it often had no choice but to invest in internal R&D.

And that in fact later "lack of anti-trust enforcement... killed the labs".

Makes sense to me. Goes to show that our "intuition" (of course informed by cultural assumptions) for how capitalism works and it's effects isn't necessarily accurate.

</comment><comment><USER47> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246672)

</comment><comment> the-dude Previously : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246672)

</comment><comment><USER48> Under-taxation of corporations plays a significant role in the decline of research spending. While potential competitive advantage is one reason to pursue research and development, taxes and the interplay between tax and corporate accounting are another reason (even prior to 1981).

While taxes paid by corporations benefit the general public, from the corporation's point of view taxes are money out the door with zero possible return. So what does a prudent corporation do with its profits? It recognizes that they are potential capital and seeks to maximize the risk-adjusted return on capital.

It can bank them at the risk-free rate of return, but we should remember taxes will take a healthy chunk out of that return on the front end. It can pay them out to investors as dividends (increasing the return on remaining capital by reducing the denominator). Note that under rational tax schemes the risk adjusted return on capital should be equivalent to investing at the risk free rate of return (modulo management of cash-flow risks). It can buy riskier assets with higher return, such as other companies. And it can make much riskier investments, like research and development. As with most things financial, the best overall risk adjusted return on capital is diverse in both kind and in risk level. It should do all of those things (treating dividends as equivalent to investment at the risk free rate of return), with the proportion going to each tuned to achieve the aggregate optimum(1). Also, can you see how a regulated utility with(like AT&T of old) would find R&D attractive for spicing up its asset mix?

Think of R&D as producing a stream of lottery tickets with the drawing in the distant future. Those lottery tickets (for a tech company) can pay off in two ways. One is that they could produce or enhance a revenue stream. The other is that they could reduce risk in the form of patents (reduce competitive risk and risk of patent suits by threat of countersuit). Both of these payoffs improve risk adjusted return on capital (by generating return or reducing risk). The neat thing about R&D for a company that's paying real taxes is that much of the cost is (from a tax point of view) is an expense. In other words, that allocation of capital doesn't have the upfront bite taken out of it that occurs when profits are directed to risk free assets. Looking at this from a risk-adjusted return point of view, having a real tax burden increases the appetite for risk by decreasing the relative attractiveness of the risk-free alternative after taxes. This is doubly true for expenditures that look like expenses to tax collectors but look like capital investment for corporate accounting purposes.

None of this holds true if a company isn't paying much in the way of taxes on its profits. It doesn't mean some amount of R&D isn't still attractive, but the appetite for risk is lower. And let's be clear, R&D in research labs is the riskiest kind of R&D.

Well, you might say, the 1981 R&D tax credit is sweeter than a deduction. Doesn't that tilt the scales back? Yes, but subject to the limitations of the tax credit (which are numerous). But, like the deduction, the tax credit is much less valuable for companies that aren't paying taxes on their profits. And, to be clear, this is a Reagan measure taken with full knowledge of what was expected to happen to corporate tax rates and the impact that might have on R&D investment. It's a partial mitigant for that, nothing more.

I am fully aware that I have murdered both CAPM and the practice of accounting in compressing this down to a reasonable post with what I hope is a clear narrative. My apologies to practitioners of both.

(1) An important aside: People make equity investments to take more risk in the expectation of higher return. Beyond the cash cushion necessary for minimizing cash-flow risk, massive cash hoards do nothing but dilute the risk (and return) rational investors are actively seeking to take. There is some argument to be made that large tech companies keep huge cash hoards because their core businesses are riskier than they appear (esp black swan events), but it probably has more to do with founders desire for independence.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is Capitalism. Let the government and educational institutions spend all of the money, do the real work and research, and then as a private company swoop in and reap all of the benefits.

A blatant example would be Gilead Truvada for PrEP. US Tax payer funded research and all profits go straight to Gilead.

<comment><USER45> _A blatant example would be Gilead Truvada for PrEP. US Tax payer funded research and all profits go straight to Gilead._

That's such a gross oversimplification to the point it's just wrong. If you want to read how one of the two drugs in the combo was developed, I'd suggest this journal article [1] - I warn you, the story evolves over 15 years.

The initial discovery of the class of compounds was done at Emory university. Emory then partnered with Burroughs Wellcome. Burroughs Wellcome was then acquired by Glaxo, who halted the research. The rights then went back to Emory, who then spun it out to a start-up called Triangle Pharmaceuticals, who was then acquired by Gilead who brought Truvada to market.

Emory did sue a number of manufactures as they had a patent, but it was settled with a fat ($525M) cash payment to Emory and an on-going royalty stream.

[1][https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5777139/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5777139/)</comment></comment>


Legalize It All – How to Win the War on Drugs (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/?single=1 <comment><USER2> It's interesting that whenever the subject of legalizing drugs comes up, people rarely argue for legalization from the perspective of cognitive liberty. Why we allow certain people to decide what states of consciousness are allowed for other people never ceases to amaze me.

<comment> chroem- I'm a huge fan of Washington State's ban on public smoking, and I wish they would ban tobacco outright.

Why then should I support proliferation of even more addictive and harmful substances? Tobacco smoke is bad enough, but used hypodermic needles laying on the ground is another issue entirely. The trouble with addictive drugs is that a person's free agency is overruled by dependancy on the substance: addicts want to quit but can't. We keep other far less harmful products off the market through regulation, and I don't see how this is any different.

<comment><USER3> Did you read the article? The percentage of people who become addicts after using drugs is actually quite low, even for the 'big four' most addictive drugs (cocaine, heroin, meth, and crack)... so it is NOT true that everyone's free agency is overruled by addiction. In fact, a significant majority do not lose free agency; should they all be restricted because some people can't handle it?

The harmful products we should regulate are ones whose use harms other people; things like pesticides, pollutants, etc. Otherwise, where do you draw the line? Lots of people think playing video games or watching tv 'rots your brain.' Some people eat way too much unhealthy food. Should we ban tvs and Doritos?

<comment><USER4> > In fact, a significant majority do not lose free agency; should they all be > restricted because some people can't handle it?

What's the difference between this argument and "why should I have to pay for the insurance of others who get sick? should we all have to pay because a few can't live a healthy life?"?

<comment><USER5> >What's the difference between this argument and "why should I have to pay for the insurance of others who get sick? should we all have to pay because a few can't live a healthy life?"?

Accepting universal drug prohibition is not anything like accepting mandatory insurance. Mandatory insurance results in nearly everyone being covered by insurance. Conversely, universal prohibition doesn't result in people NOT using drugs, it simply results in drugs being expensive and unregulated. Over a century of of strict prohibition has demonstrated this extensively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Beware, though. It's true that the war on drugs seems to do much more harm than the products they try to prevent people from consuming, but I would worry a bit about a world where big pharmaceutical could suddenly research recreational drugs as business opportunities.

Medicine is only for sick people. Recreational drugs would potentially be for everyone. Plus, they can be made extremely addictive. It's the perfect commercial product.

New drugs already exists that are more addictive and powerful than old ones. Like Fentanyl, for instance[1]. Who knows what research labs would come up with if they threw lots of money and brain power into it?

A global legalization of drugs would be quite a Pandora's box. I'll quote Noah Harari and say it would start what he calls "the chemical pursuit of happiness" [2].

In the end, the risk is that we end up like the woman with an orgasm button[3], or turn us into some kind of vegetative state, as described in "the metamorphosis of Prime intellect"[4].

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_Tomorrow)

3\. [http://boingboing.net/2008/09/16/brain-implant- result.html](http://boingboing.net/2008/09/16/brain-implant-result.html)

4\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Int...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect)

<comment><USER7> > "New drugs already exists that are more addictive and powerful than old > ones. Like Fentanyl, for instance. Who knows what research labs would come > up with if they threw lots of money and brain power into it?"

Taking the perspective of a business man, it's possible for drugs to be too addictive, as they have the bad side effect of killing your customers, which is bad for revenue and a PR disaster. So even if a 'designer drug' market emerged, I don't think you'd find many companies that wanted to develop something as addictive as fentanyl.

<comment><USER8> I'd imagine a legal Fentanyl wouldn't get great reviews on Yelp. Or more likely, TRIPadvisor, get it? Serious point, jokingly said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The quote in this article is dubious at best. There is no other evidence that Erlichman said this, and no evidence in the Nixon archives to back up allgation made in the quote, even if Erlichman had said it. Erlichman served time in prison for Watergate, and seems to have been annoyed about not being pardoned.

The records from the Nixon presidency suggest that the WOD was actually driven by Nixon's fixed belief in then-prevalent myths about the danger to America from blacks, homosexuals, drug use and mental damage.

[https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/32247/did- ehrli...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/32247/did-ehrlichman- claim-the-reason-for-the-nixon-drug-war-was-to-criminalize-black/33044#33044)

[https://medium.com/@ReachCASP/health-scientist- blacklisting-...](https://medium.com/@ReachCASP/health-scientist-blacklisting- and-the-meaning-of-marijuana-in-the-oval-office-in-the- early-1970s-71ea41427b49#.9ksrgwmj3)

</comment><comment><USER10> The war on drugs policy is a disaster.

As someone who enjoys doing drugs I have put though into the stigmatization legality and health effects of drugs.

Much like healthcare this is an extremely complex subject.

Decriminalization:

Pros: helps treat addiction as a public health issue. Keeps people out of the prison industrial complex. Takes the taboo elements out of it for the youth.

Cons: supports the drug trafficking systems that kill people. Strips tax revenue from governments and money from 9companies who can help treat addiction. No quality control of drugs - look at tweekers and junkies who can't afford quality gear. Spread of infectious diseases.

Legalization: Pros: substances can be produced by companies who can compete to make good quality drugs. Generates tax revenue and stimulates the economy. Puts a wrench in the cog of the drug trafficking systems - less babies filled with dope and dead drug mules.

Cons: companies exploit addicts. Drugs get marketed to the wrong people. Drug revenues go to support more corrupt politicians. Drug addiction becomes normalized.

It also raises other questions such as what are the goals of our greater society? Living in a rigid corporate, industrialized society leaves little time for many people to have recreation time. Being strung out or twisted on meth can make it hard to keep up with the rigors of life.

I also don't want the construction crew down the street drunk or high on heroin working the tower crane... downers impare your motor skills. Stimulants go after your cognitive and social abilities.

Tough topic.

<comment><USER11> > I also don't want the construction crew down the street drunk or high on > heroin working the tower crane... downers impare your motor skills. > Stimulants go after your cognitive and social abilities.

Legalisation of drugs doesn't mean you can drive while under the influence of heroin, or operate machinery under the influence of amphetamines.

Interestingly, amphetamines are already commonly used in the construction trade (particularly shop-fitting) to help people work the "crunch" timeframes.

<comment><USER12> This is another crucial but obvious point that somehow gets glossed over -- we already have laws for criminal negligence, DUI, littering (for the syringes that everyone is complaining about), disorderly conduct, theft, etc. so there is no need to worry that the world will collapse into disorderly chaos.

There is zero indication that someone will decide to just do heroin because it's suddenly legal, and Portugal's recent history indicates that it's possible to simultaneously lessen addiction rates while moving toward less criminalization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> H. L. Mencken identified in Americans "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

A better, more succinct description of the American attitude that created and still fuels the drug war (amongst other disgusting things) simply does not exist. You can write a million pages and not get as much clarity as Mencken does in this one phrase.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Addiction is a hideous condition, but it's rare."

Is this a true statement for harder drugs?

<comment><USER15> Yes.

> Proportion of users that become dependent:

> Tobacco: 32-68%

> Alcohol: 15-23%

> Cannabis: 9% (30% of users with abuse or dependence)

> Cocaine: 17-21%

> Stimulants: 11%

> Anxiolytics (includes benzodiazepines): 9%

> Analgesics i.e. pain relievers: 8%

> Psychedelics: 5%

> Heroin: 23%

> Anthony, Warner, Kessler, 1994; Lopez-Quintero, Pérez de los Cobos, Hasin, > et al., 2011

[http://www.rethinkpsychedelics.org/](http://www.rethinkpsychedelics.org/)

<comment><USER16> Almost everything is > ~10%. Maybe it's just me, but I would consider 1/10 people getting addicted (i.e. psychologically or physically dependent on the drug to the point of ruin or death) extremely high.

<comment><USER17> > i.e. psychologically or physically dependent on the drug to the point of > ruin or death

That's not what dependence means. That could be an outcome. And each of those drugs has a different potential outcome from long term use.

Take for example the difference between marijuana and cigarettes. Cigarettes are much more addictive, and have clear evidence of causing lung cancer. It would seem logical that marijuana would also cause lung cancer, but there is not enough evidence to say for certain that it does.

So dependence on cigarettes can definitively kill you. Dependence on marijuana might make you less employable, but it's not certain that it might kill you.

<comment><USER18> It would seem logical that _smoking_ marijuana would also cause lung cancer. But there are many other ways in which you can take it.

<comment><USER19> Why would it seem logical that smoking marijuana would cause lung cancer? That seems like an overly simplified model for cancer.

Anyway, there is no data showing smoking marijuana causes lung cancer (rather, there is no high quality data. I'm sure some NIDA-funding scientists have found otherwise, but it's not considered correct).

The NSF review concluded that, at most, smoking marijuana causes respiratory problems, but _not_ lung cancer. The only type of cancer positively associated with marijuana smoking was a form of prostate cancer, which happens to be easily treated.

<comment><USER18> Logical in a sense that it's a reasonable initial premise in the absence of other evidence. Not saying that it's true, but if you don't know if it's true or not, and you know that smoking other things does give you cancer, that's the side I'd err on.

<comment><USER19> nope, the null hypothesis is "smoking something does not give you cancer". That smoking other things gives you cancer is specific to what they contain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Definitely agree.. if not legalization, decriminalization. You cannot criminalize someone who is addicted to something. In fact, if were to get politically correct with treating addicts like criminals and arresting them, it is probably likely that over 100 million Americans would be in jail for being addicted to a substance.

I wrote an article on the decriminalization of drugs. The only ones "winning" the war on drugs are those who have turned it into a business. [http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/drug-user- decrimi...](http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/drug-user- decriminalization/)

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't think we are ever going to be able to move towards a perfectly- reasonable public stance towards intoxicants. My personal problem with marijuana is that I just don't want to smell the shit everywhere.

Your human right to ingest whatever substance you want is going to inevitably conflict with my right to choose _whether_ I want to ingest it too or not. We've gone in one policy direction with marijuana, and another entirely with tobacco. Once you get to legalization, you're inevitably thrust back towards getting it the heck back out of the public sphere.

Tobacco seems to offer the perfect opportunity to examine the intersection of human rights way of looking at it with "plain ole'" regulation for greater social harmony. Tobacco, like it or not, is a mind-altering drug that people rely on for all sorts of really personal reasons. Our recent push to banish it is pure and simple classism.

But the people decrying the war on drugs also seem to often nurture a quiet bigotry against smokers. Smoking is legal, for now at least. But eventually you won't be able to light up without running afoul of some regulation, God forbid they start actually enforcing the now-common 50 foot rule from the entrance of businesses.

So yeah, maybe the focus on tax revenue is probably the best one. I like human rights as much as the next guy. But I'm gonna turn into a raving classist asshole the second my neighbor forces me to smell his damn weed through the shared wall. (yes it's happened) I'm already quietly cheering the slow banishment of tobacco, cognitive liberty be damned.

Sure, cannabis and tobacco are both smoked, and not all drugs are. But are we really prepared as a society for a world in which drug use is truly legal? Are people really forgetting that these things are well and truly dangerous? Cocaine makes a real mess out of people.

What about synthetic drugs? I don't think you're ever going to be able to convince a reasonable person that those things should be legal. So there you go, War on Drugs part 2.

To sum up, legalization isn't really a viable public option. It's a fantasy.

<comment><USER11> > Our recent push to banish it is pure and simple classism.

No, it's a response to the overwhelming evidence we have that smoking tobacco is massively harmful.

You seem to be saying that poor people will be disproportionately affected by smoking cessation laws, and that this is somehow unjust. The fact that poor people disproportionately smoke is the actual injustice, and is one of the reasons for the mortality gap between rich and poor.

<comment><USER21> > No, it's a response to the overwhelming evidence we have that smoking > tobacco is massively harmful.

Pardon me while I guffaw incessantly. That might be the excuse given, but people really just don't want to smell it all the time.

<comment><USER12> That's a disgusting reason to put people in prison.

<comment><USER21> You don't have to go to prison if you don't break the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> By this definition of win we also "won" the Vietnam war.

</comment><comment><USER23> What if they were legal but every sale had a special tax with the money specifically going to rehab and for those who need help.

<comment><USER24> I imagine regulated distribution. Make people have to jump through hoops, get enrolled in a national registry and take educational classes on the drugs. Incentivize this route by offering cheap/free, pure drugs so that black market alternatives become exceedingly less worthwhile. Basically the meta version of parents allowing their kids to drink under supervision. Society has a chance to convey and establish norms for use and can intervene if a person falls into dangerous patterns.

<comment><USER25> You don't see potential problems with a national registry of drug users? Like say, employers, snoopy neighbors and political opponents?

<comment><USER24> That's a great point. I actually heard of a colleague of mine who was injured on the job at his previous work. He did construction. They found out he was a medical marijuana patient and that made him ineligible for re-employment or workers comp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> No drugs are degenerate.

<comment><USER27> Not sure if this is an anti-drug statement with poor punctuation...Or pro-drug legalization.

<comment><USER26> It is

<comment><USER28> Clears that right up.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Science behind teaching Problem Solving - <AUTHOR> http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/3169/teaching-problem-solving-mastering-bit-by-bit-vs-try-it-all-by-yourself

<comment><USER2> The first answer is remarkably interesting and informative. Recommended.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it would be a good idea to generate some science before using the term "cognitive science" so freely. Cognitive psychology is notable for how many descriptions it has, and for how few explanations or reproducible results.</comment>


Hi Tesla. We Are Top Dutch - <AUTHOR> https://www.topdutch.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> How a northern region in the Netherlands wants to attract Elon Musk's GigaFactory.

I think this is the first time I've seen national government, provinces and business pitch their region to a single player in the market using a fancy microsite.</comment>


IOS Devs Hit by Patent Infringement Notices For In-App Purchases - <AUTHOR> http://www.macstories.net/news/ios-devs-hit-by-patent-infringement-notices-for-in-app-purchases/#more-22837

<comment><USER2> Using the logic of this company, why stop there? Why not go after users of the apps that use in-app purchases?

<comment><USER3> May as well just finish it off with "everyone who uses a smartphone for any purpose anywhere." They'll get there. They're just testing to see just how far they can push it.

Even the trolls are starting to shake their heads in disbelief when they discover just how far the absurdity can be taken. But why say no to free money?</comment></comment>


Startup Quote: Ben Huh, founder, Cheezburger Network - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/1393583103

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm always throwing out ideas, so it's not creativity, it's just volume.

\- Ben Huh (@benhuh)</comment>


Humans Navigate with Stereo Olfaction - <AUTHOR> https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/06/17/2004642117 <comment><USER2> I've thought that you are only breathing through one hole of your nose? Is there still some minor airflow through the other hole to enable stereo olfaction?

<comment><USER3> If one of your nostrils is permanently blocked, this is abnormal. Perhaps you want to see an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist?

<comment> din-9 They were referring to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle) I assume.

<comment><USER2> Indeed I was. E.g. check this figure: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5053491/figure/...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5053491/figure/pone.0162918.g011/?report=objectonly)

One nostril has basically no pressure changes while the other one does. How can you smell that way in stereo?

<comment><USER4> Presumably breathing has no effect on the diffusion of odors from far away to the immediate vicinity of the nostrils. So, diffusion can also take odors from the temporarily-inactive nostril deeper into the sinus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> another paper on the topic that does not require subscription, [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0129387)

<comment><USER6> [https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/0...](https://sci- hub.tw/https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/06/17/2004642117)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Obligatory Feynman anecdote (quickest reference story I could find worth linking to, rest of the article is relevant as well)

[https://www.salon.com/1999/07/28/smell/](https://www.salon.com/1999/07/28/smell/)

<comment><USER8> Haha good article. I always smell things before I eat them by default. One interesting thing I noticed is how much smell boosts taste. Some time ago I lost my sense of smell completely and I distinctly remember how the food tastes boring and plain with just texture and sweet and salt making any difference. Smell adds so much to it that I was honestly surprised.

<comment><USER9> Yes, surely this must be the main use for human smell, to evaluate the safety of food. I remember being laughed at in my youth because I would always sniff a drink before drinking it (these were in my university days so a lot of odd concotions were imbibed). Seemed to me that it gave some very crucial information about what you were to expect!

<comment><USER10> My father-in-law was a produce inspector for 40+ years. He said that after a while, all he ever did was smell it. He could be walking up to the truck or rail car from across the parking lot and know if it was good or bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another thing working remote can't do (not that I'm fully sold olfaction is stereo)

Digital will not replace most human orientated things until it can directly program the brain.</comment>


Show HN: Instant CMS as a Service on any element (with contenteditable) - <AUTHOR> https://copybar.io <comment><USER2> Glad to see that contenteditable-type editors are becoming more viable. Looks like Copybar uses Redactor, but I'm hoping bergie's <http://hallojs.org/> gets a lot more traction since it's the only one that's MIT licensed.

<comment><USER3> The good thing about Hallo is, besides licensing and easy plugin development, the fact that it uses plain, unstyled contentEditables, so the stuff you're editing looks exactly like it will look on the real page.

I integrated Redactor as another editor option in Create.js a while back, but it looks a bit strange because it changes the styling of the currently active content area. Other than that it is very simple and clean!

Another valid editor option is Aloha, <http://aloha-editor.org>

You can use any (or even all) of these with Create, or integrate your own. The next editor I'm looking to add is CKEditor 4, as it also has an inline editing mode: <http://nightly-v4.ckeditor.com/3627/samples/inlineall.html>

<comment><USER4> Great point. We hacked redactor up so that it does just that, allows for unstyled contentEditables. Check it out with the Try Now button on the landing page, you can see the styles don't change.

<comment><USER3> Great, have to check that out. Here is the Redactor integration for Create: [https://github.com/bergie/create/blob/master/src/editingWidg...](https://github.com/bergie/create/blob/master/src/editingWidgets/jquery.Midgard.midgardEditableEditorRedactor.js)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is the beginning of the end for Facebook.

Let me explain ...

Like AOL, Facebook is a walled garden reproducing what is standard and open on the web/internet as a whole. AOL had AOL email, Facebook has html homepages, and RSS/ATOM

But "people" cannot create their own content - they cannot write HTML, host web pages etc. But _contenteditable_ fixes all that - and with the clever Dropbox tie in, anyone can start with a templated page, drag and drop images from their own desktop, (#) and publish themselves.

Add in RSS via Javascript and its all over.

(#) oh yes drag and drop images onto a web page - its soooo cool. Aloha supports it at least.

<comment><USER6> Let me get this straight -- my grandma has to get a Dropbox (what's that?), download a templated page, fill it her own images, and then figure out how to publish it?

Also, there are a lot easier ways out there to publish your own content online (Weebly, Tumblr, etc) but that doesn't seem to have stopped Facebook.

<comment><USER7> Dear sweet "Grams" is only on Facebook because that's where her grandchildren hang out. If they leave, do you think she's going to stick around? Doubt it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. Though of course you can just use my <http://createjs.org/> and get pretty much the same thing for free :-)

<comment><USER8> CreateJS is awesome. This service seems to be more about content hosting though. So still useful to some people I think.

<comment><USER3> True, though usually people would seem rather want to have their content on their own servers, and have an API the editing tool uses to save. This is the scenario Create.js was built for, allowing you to use it in a custom web app, but also major CMSs like TYPO3 or OpenCms to build their custom UIs on top of it.

<comment><USER8> Definitely. I bet there's a lot of companies / startups who need something quick and simple though. So lots of room for both solutions.

<comment><USER3> Yep, having 'competition' sort of validates the approach :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Website looks really good!

Is copybar dynamically replacing the content and then next time when the page is loaded javascript replaces the content by fetching the value from copybar CDN?

At least it looks like copybar is not changing the actual CMS database content values. Please correct me if I misunderstood the mechanics.

The problem with dynamic replacing would be: 1) search engines get the old text 2) original CMS editing functionality becomes useless for that specific node.

<comment><USER4> Copybar cofounder here.

Thanks! Yeah, we're using the CDN to dynamically display your edited content.

When editing an element, we invalidate the cache on the CDN. It may take a minute or 2 to propagate.

Search engines these days execute Javascript so it can index this dynamic text. However we also have a backend integration solution (via a simple rest call) for people who would rather serve the content from their web servers directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The pricing seems way out of wack. If, for instance, I wanted to use your product to create a squarespace competitor, I'd need a $99 licence per user per month?

I can't actually think of a practical use case for the Pro-xx accounts. A fairly simple blog would easily have a 100 assets or more. Even a simple corporate blog would have 100 assets after a few months.

In particular, I'm trying to figure out what your expected use case is for the Pro-20 account ... what kind of site would I have only 20 assets that I want multiple editors to be able to change?

Websites tend to be many asset/many editors or many assets/few editors. I can't think of too many few assets/many editor situations.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting concept, well done for shipping. Just a couple of points:

\- You id="mask" element has a higher z-order than your formatting popup making it impossible to select styles in the demo.

\- The blink from the original to the edited content is kind of jarring. Not sure where your servers are, but here from AUS the lag was very noticable.

\- This is a peeve I have with all editors: When you select a H1,2,3 etc style the entire block is styled. This is the opposite of what users expect. Instead you should break that fragment out and run your execCommand on it. This way only the selected text receives the style and your users aren't left scratching their heads :)

\- Consider adding an in-line editor for in-line images. Popping over a modal editor onmouseup is not intuitive for your average Joe.

<comment><USER4> Copybar cofounder here, thanks for the great feedback. We'll take a look at the mask issue asap. Delivery will continue to be optimized and I dig your ideas on the styling and image editing, look for those enhancements soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> ...so my site would have and ADMINISTRATIVE/EDITORIAL feature that depends on a 3rd party service now?! Thanks but no thanks...

(Sometimes I wish people would go back to the golden days of "software as a product" instead of the current "everything as a service" way of selling things... I just wanna pay for it once, include it as a plugin for my CMS and MAYBE pay extra for some kind of support... and yes, I would be willing to pay for an upgrate to the next version too...)

</comment><comment><USER13> Doesn't seem that anyone has mentioned this, but that watermark is the only thing stopping me from immediately putting this into production. Would be nicer from a consumer perspective if I could try this out in production with the full feature set, but just a limited element quantity.

<comment><AUTHOR> The badge is meant for free accounts. But please, email me (firstname.lastname@example.com) and we'll get you setup ASAP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ohhhh, nice! This is sick, I could see using this as a way better CopyCopter replacement.

<comment><USER4> Cofounder here, we did find some inspiration in CopyCopter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just one small feedback as a designer, if you want to see more conversions for sign-ups, convert that black sign-up button into green. Other than that, it's perfect!

<comment><USER16> Design impaired developer here; i'm interested to know how you picked green as being a trigger for more conversions, is there some data with A/B testing this color choice comes from?

<comment><USER15> Yes, I think there's a famous book on Psychology of colors, I don't remember its name, but it explains in great depth about colors affect purchases...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks really cool, but I was wondering if you could address a point with the pricing. In that context what does an "asset" mean? An editable area on a webpage?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, basically each asset (we're trying to say 'Copybar element') is one editable chunk. It could be one paragraph or picture, or it could be all custom HTML.

Also, something interesting: you can use the same element across many different pages. It will repeat the same content, but still count as only 1 element.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Pasting causes tab to crash in Windows Chrome 22.0.1229.94

<comment><USER4> Copybar cofounder here. Sorry about that. Please email me at firstname.lastname@example.com. We'll try to repo and fix ASAP

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does someone actually uses this tools for editing webpages? I find them really uncomfortable. Not trying to flame, just an honest question.

<comment><USER20> I actually have been looking for something like this. Mainly so I can give some nontechnical people access to edit different parts of a page. This hasn't been easy to set up in drupal or wordpress (without a large learning curve on their parts). I might give Copybar a try and see if it works out for me.

<comment><USER4> Copybar cofounder here, that is one of our primary use cases. Instances when a CMS fails to address access controls for nontechnical people. Even drupal and wp can seem overwhelming to some. The best thing is Copybar can sit on top of Drupal and Wordpress. If you do end up using it let us know, we'd love to be able to feature some live implementations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Any pointers on how to integrate with Django?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, we'd love to add a Django plugin. Can you email me at email@example.com? We'll get one set up for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't get it. What is it supposed to do. I click on the big green "Try it now" button and nothing happens...

<comment><USER4> Copybar cofounder here, sorry to hear that you didn't see anything happen. What browser are you using?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Good stuff. FYI, tried on Android, didn't work (nothing happens).

</comment><comment><USER24> you have a link on the home page that points to <http://copybardev.io:3000/examples> ...

<comment><USER4> Copybar cofounder here, great catch, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The tool looks great, but as a developer I have to say I still really prefer having HTML and CSS in front of me.</comment>


Build and run an app for your iOS/Android in under 3 mins - <AUTHOR>

We just launched TheAppBuilder.com as a tool that lets anyone to create an app and have it running on their iPhone, iPad or Android phone in 3 mins. Yep, that's a native app - not a web page in an app. We're just getting started with this technology and it would be great to get your feedback. Kick the tires at www.theappbuilder.com <comment><USER2> Haven't actually built an app yet, but two minor things come to mind about the pricing page: \- the comparison chart has red marks and dashes. Red = no. Green = yes. I'd use green checkmarks. \- $29 a month is an odd pricing to me. I don't get why this is a subscription service rather than a pay-by-app service.

Design looks clean though!</comment>


Much smaller regular expression to test divisibility by 7 - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/matthiasgoergens/Div7/blob/master/regex7

<comment><USER2> I wonder if he built a state machine and then converted it to a regular expression.

<comment><USER3> He did you just need to look at the lhs to see how he does it with haskell.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Compatible with grep -Ex

See also <http://github.com/matthiasgoergens/Div7> for the program that created it.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is completely meaningless. The final regular expression is a complete black box and I dare people to try to decipher it.</comment>


Linux beats legal threat from one of its own developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-beats-internal-legal-threat/ <comment><USER2> Unless I'm missing something, it sounds like McHardy has only dropped one of his "over 38" cases, due to the potential for a much more expensive, risky legal battle. What's to prevent him from continuing his activities in other jurisdictions under less savvy judges?

Also, how is this a victory by Linux? I see no mention of activity by the rest of the Linux community while Geniatech fought the legal battle.

<comment><USER3> I also don't understand how this is even an issue.

The companies can make him go away simply by complying with the GPL, no?

While what McHardy is doing may not be the most diplomatic stunt, it's kind of hard for me to sympathize when the companies wouldn't have to pay anything if they would just _comply with the GPL license_.

If you don't want to comply with the GPL, use BSD or something.

Am I missing something or could these companies sidestep all the legal BS with a minimal amount of effort.

<comment><USER4> If that were true you could resolve a file sharing lawsuit by stopping your torrent client. It doesn't work like that.

<comment><USER3> In the case of a torrent, the media companies generally are citing theft (rightly or wrongly) and damages. You can't just resolve theft legally by returning the thing stolen.

I don't see anybody citing theft. And, quite often, license compliance _IS_ legally resolved by coming into compliance.

However, I still find it hard to sympathize. Don't want this problem--comply with the GPL or don't use GPL software. The GPL is functioning as written and intended.

There is a reason so many companies consider GPL-licensed software to be radioactive.

<comment><USER4> > I don't see anybody citing theft

That's because it is a concept that doesn't exist. Creating a copy in violation of copyright is not theft.

Copyright is the right to limit others ability to create copies. That limitation doesn't involve things that can be stolen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In fact, he acted like a bounty hunter : chasing wrongdoers ( companies that do not comply with the GPLv2) for his own personal gain. If you are serious about the GPL license, you should also be serious about punishing companies that violate it. And if the Free Software Foundation has not enough guns, why not let bounty hunters do the job ?

<comment><USER6> Because the Linux Kernel community doesn't do enforcement like that not because they don't have enough guns, but because they believe it to be harmful to the overall ecosystem. If you plan to slowly herd them to where you want them, a bounty hunter taking loud potshots scaring everyone doesn't help.

The theory is that a violating Linux-based device where you can try to get the manufacturer to fix this in the future is better than a device with a closed system and no chance of getting it opened because the manufacturer was scared of legal consequences of using Linux.

<comment><USER7> But if the licence is not enforced, then what's the point of writing it or using it ? Put it under WTFL. Shorter, less paper work.

<comment><USER8> If it was under WTFL, the company would be able to release everything closed- source, which is exactly what the open source community is trying to discourage.

It also makes no sense to sue the companies violating the licenses. They would be more inclined to move to a closed-source option with a known fee, since the very product you are using has an ambiguous cost attached to it.

For example, I have deep disdain for people who build up WordPress or Drupal sites for clients and flat out refuse to let the customer have their code, but that still doesn't mean they should get sued to oblivion, no matter how much I disagree with this practice.

If you are for open source, you want to actively encourage the use of these platforms (regardless if you think they are trash) instead of having these people move over to some equally bad system. This is worse for the OSS community. It's also worse for the customer, since hidden fees for MS or Oracle will be tacked onto the product price. If word got out, even those who follow GPLv2 to a T would have reason to be nervous, so they'd just migrate off the platform as well.

<comment><USER7> > If it was under WTFL, the company would be able to release everything > closed-source, which is exactly what the open source community is trying to > discourage.

Apparently they already can. If there is no enforcement, what prevents anybody from doing it ? Good will.

> but that still doesn't mean they should get sued to oblivion, no matter how > much I disagree with this practice.

Remove "should" and "to oblivion", and the result seems reasonable. After all, we can't give tickets like for speeding for those infraction. The only problem with sueing here is the cost of it.

But it's perfectly alright from a moral point of view. People worked hard, sometimes for free, for free software to exist, out of idealism. The only thing they demand is to accept the licence.

<comment><USER9> Yup, all of that is strange. Because if enforcement is rare, then a simple risk analysis allows everyone to leech without contributing back. Even more so if the only punishment you may have is "comply" (publishing code that is tied to your own personal hardware is not that much a problem, I think).

Now that everybody knows the true political aim of the GPLv3 and that we know the pragmatism of BSD and others, I wonder under what license would the kernel have been published today...

<comment><USER10> >publishing code that is tied to your own personal hardware is not that much a problem, I think

Code tied to your own hardware can lead to reverse engineering and creating other software to be used with said hardware. This is a good thing (for the user) though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very OT, but I just found it funny that this renowned tech website that has published articles like "It's HTTPS or bust: How to secure your website"[1] doesn't use HTTPS itself.

[1]: [http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-secure-your- website/](http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-secure-your-website/)

<comment><USER12> When you see this for a news website, it's usually because they deal with dodgy ad networks that aren't https yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'll admit this is offtopic, but why on earth do they insist on putting an unrelated video on autoplay at the top of the page? I'm there to read the article and just when I've read the first few sentences, I get distracted by movement and the sound of Linux Torvalds' voice. Something about DRM and GPLv3 which are not at all related to the article contents. Sure, it might be an interesting video, but on autoplay... really?

<comment><USER14> You can disable autoplay in Chrome by navigating to chrome://flags and setting the "autoplay policy" config option to require explicit user activation.

In Firefox, navigate to about:config, and change media.autoplay.enabled to false.

<comment><USER15> The video autoplayed for me so I decided to check this setting which I was 99% sure I had already set at some point in the past (I use Chrome).

Turns out I had and ZDNet is somehow getting around it.

Another site for the blacklist, then.

<comment><USER16> You might want to give uMatrix a try. It can be a bit of a pain at times, but in my experience, it catches autoplay videos quite reliably, as well as a lot of ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am probably missing something here, as usual, but this does not really sound like a clear win. Is the Linux community effectively enforcing compliance with the GPL? I sort of understand how someone could see individual litigation to be a threat to the ecosystem, but doesn't that assume that we value usage more than compliance? Isn't it also a threat to the ecosystem if developers decide not to contribute because they feel their code will just get stolen for commercial profit?

Maybe this makes more sense if the vast majority of kernel developers are commercially funded and not volunteers.

<comment><USER18> What I got from this article is that the guy was basically trying to extort money from companies that hadn't complied in the past.

This particular company fixed their compliance issues, and Patrick McHardy still went after them once they had. He did so while hiding it from other kernel developers, and kept all of the money for himself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> short version: a (major) contributor to Linux sued companies that infringes on Linux's license for his personal gain, but a judge finally stopped him by ruling that he cannot sue over the entire kernel.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm aware that copyright assignments are often seen as an unnecessary burden to potential contributors, but for large projects like the Linux kernel this actually makes sense.

This would have never happed with any GNU project, or OpenLayers, etc.

<comment><USER21> If I publish my work as open source I want it to be kept open source. Linux doesn't seem that interested in the second part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If anyone needed another reason to avoid GPL software here you go. I thought the whole idea of open source was to avoid litigious assholes.

<comment><USER23> > I thought the whole idea of open source was to avoid litigious assholes.

How is that? Not sure what you mean.

Writing everything from scratch in-house is how you usually avoid litigious assholes.

When using someone else's stuff it is a good idea to comply with the licensing terms. That's also a valid strategy to avoid litigation.

<comment><USER24> > Writing everything from scratch in-house is how you usually avoid litigious > assholes.

Nah, that just gets you a patent suit.

<comment><USER23> I meant in regard to copyright. Can still get a patent suit even if using open source software.</comment></comment></comment></comment>